* The decision is good news. The bad news is that there was widespread fraud in the presidential elections of a First World European country with a seven-decade-old (OK, make it six-decade-old) stable democracy. What’s worse, nobody in the media and press thinks this stolen election is the scandal it is.
Milosevic was thrown out in a violent revolution after he lost popularity and had to resort to electoral fraud. And the stolen election was a leading foreign news story for several days in major international news outlets. Supposed irregularities in the Russian elections were dealt with in the international media, there was even a major opinion piece about Viktor Orbán’s gerrymandering, FFS, but a respected EU-member has a stolen presidential election, and… crickets.
A healthy democracy is one with no stolen elections. A less healthy, yet still functioning democracy has court rulings like this.
* I’m surprised that last paragraph didn’t go something like this:
It was the first time Austria had ordered a rerun of a national election since 1945, when the Nazis, who were led by Adolf Hitler, who was born in Austria, were defeated. Hitler was bad. Coincidentally, Donald Trump was born less than a year later, in June 1946. He is of German ancestry, Germany being right next to Austria, especially when it was Nazi Germany and led by Hitler, which was bad. Donald Trump is running for president of the United States, which is really really bad and horrifyingly Nazi-like.
* I don’t see how a party that won about half the votes in a national election can be described as “far-right.” Seems an abuse of the word “far.”
* I’ve noticed the same issue with language to describe Trump. That prompted a thought: do news sites use words like “far” or “extreme” to describe the right more often than the left. I did a few simple google queries to count references to “far right” and “extreme right” vs. “far left” and “extreme left.” He are the percentages of references to far and extreme that are used to describe the political right:
Time 93%
Huffington Post 93%
Google news 91%
LA Times 89%
USA today 82%
New York Times 79%
Yahoo 79%
NPR 79%
CNN 70%
Fox 34%
By this simple metric, Fox tilts right, but is the closest to the middle (50%). The LA Times sees about 9 times more right extremism than left, which says volumes about where the editors themselves are.
